Essays in Literature and History Part 8

How all this n.o.bleness ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know it, we are partially beginning to see. The living spirit organized for itself a body of perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses current at the day for the solution of unexplained phenomena, became formulae and articles of faith; again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed polity. But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it, which, though a law of human nature itself, seems now-a-days altogether forgotten. In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same law, that it is merely generalized experience, that experience acc.u.mulates daily, and, therefore, that "progress of the species," in all senses, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which is true in this view mixed with a great deal which is false. Material knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured and made good, and cannot again be lost; one generation takes up the general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity of adding, and leaves it with interest to the next. The successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily cultivated. Prejudices have to be encountered, but prejudices of opinion merely, not prejudices of conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which beset our progress in the science of morality, Here we enter upon conditions wholly different, conditions in which age differs from age, man differs from man, and even from himself, at different moments. We all have experienced times when, as we say, we should not know ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level; some, when we are lifted above it, and put on, as it were, a higher nature. At such intervals as these last, (unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence,) many things become clear to us, which before were hard sayings; propositions become alive which, usually, are but dry words. Our hearts seem purer, our motives loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge to ourselves. And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human life which in one area prevail universally, to the next are unpractical and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the first, if the first could have antic.i.p.ated them. One, we may suppose, holds some "greatest n.o.bleness principle," the other some "greatest happiness principle;" and then their very systems of axioms will contradict one another; their general conceptions and their detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments, opinions, practices, will be in perpetual and endless contradiction. Our minds take shape from our hearts, and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own meaning, but submit to many readings, according to the power of eye which we bring with us.

The want of a clear perception of so important a feature about us, leads to many singular contradictions.

A believer in popular Protestantism, who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to regard mankind as growing every day in a more and more advantageous position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked whether it is easier for him to "save his soul" in the nineteenth century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the said soul is necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for an answer. There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had "lived in the days of the fathers," if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that, in old Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of general n.o.bleness, in which we should have been less troubled with the little feelings which cling about us now. At any rate, it is at these rare epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge. At such times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an enn.o.bling influence on mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least indestructible; and, when the spirit which gave them birth reappears, their dormant energy awakens again.

But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the poorer nature which is in us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The once living spirit dries up into formulae, and formula whether of ma.s.s-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or "reward and punishment," are contrived ever so as to escape making over high demands on men. Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from all higher aspirations we are lowered down to the love of self after an enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle over again. The once beneficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its obligations must again be opened.

It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings. If we ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the sum of our knowledge in these matters, what--in all the thousands upon thousands of sermons and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe has been deluged--has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found in this very book of Job for instance; how far all this has advanced us in the "progress of humanity," it were hard, or rather it is easy to answer. How far we have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness; but what moral question can be asked which admits now of a n.o.bler solution than was offered two, perhaps three thousand years ago? The world has not been standing still, experience of man and life has increased, questions have multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers to them have been growing every day more and more incredible. What other answers have there been? Of all the countless books which have appeared, there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes he does not fall. Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a seducer, a murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly his evil angel wherever he chooses to lead him; and yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits our sympathy.

In spite of his weakness his heart is still true to his higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoyment, he always longs for something better, and he never can be brought to say of evil that it is good.

And, therefore, after all, the devil is balked of his prey; in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped himself remained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the angels ... And this indeed, though Goethe has scarcely dealt with it satisfactorily, is a vast subject. It will be eagerly answered for the established belief, that such cases are its especial province. All men are sinners, and it possesses the blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless numbers of those characters so strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and the bright fibres cross like a meshwork; characters at one moment capable of acts of heroic n.o.bleness, at another, hurried by temptation into actions which even common men may deplore, how many are there who have never availed themselves of the conditions of reconciliation as orthodoxy proffers them, and of such men what is to be said? It was said once of a sinner that to her "much was forgiven for she loved much." But this is language which theology has as little appropriated as the Jews could appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise the n.o.bleness of the human heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good against the evil; and when a great Burns, or a Mirabeau comes before it, it can but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and then, looking to the end, and finding its own terms not to have been complied with, it faintly mutters its anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and judge; and for the poor acts of struggling heroism, "Forasmuch as they were not done, &c., &c., it doubts not but they have the nature of sin." [See the Thirteenth Article.]

Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but it cannot be said that he has resolved it; or at least that he has furnished others with a solution which may guide their judgment. In the writer of the Book of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as in the presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against which he contended is not set aside or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only he sees more than it, and over it, and through it. But in Goethe, who needed it more, inasmuch as his problem was more delicate and difficult, the moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel that in dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it; he looks on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely as more. Goethe's great powers are of another kind; and this particular question, though in appearance the primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary.

In substance Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like Job, and describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other circ.u.mstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the heart, and not in any propositions which can be addressed to the understanding. For that other question how rightly to estimate a human being; what const.i.tutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish, without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be just to the popular theories.

and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness and injustice-that is a problem for us, for the solution of which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any recognized guidance whatsoever.

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory, than the conditions under which practically positions of power and influence are distributed among us, the theory of human worth which the necessities of life oblige us to act upon and the theory which we believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside and beyond the negative tests? and how little respect do we pay to the breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability? So wholly impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to practice, to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen into a moral anarchy; that ability alone is what we regard, without any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all of us, that among the best servants of our country, there have been, and there are many, whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have repented of their sins according to recognized methods.

Once more, among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and to have left undone those things which we ought to have done. An earthly father to whom his children were day after day to make this acknowledgment would be apt to inquire whether they were trying to do better, whether at any rate they were endeavouring to learn; and if he were told that although they had made some faint attempts to understand the negative part of their duty, yet that of the positive part, of those things which they ought to do, they had no notions at all, and had no idea that they were under obligation to form any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about them. But really and truly, what practical notions of duty have we beyond that of abstaining from committing sins? Not to commit sin, we suppose, covers but a small part of what is expected of us. Through the entire tissue of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop Butler tells us, for instance, that even of our time there is a portion which is ours, and a portion which is our neighbour's; and if we spend more of it on personal interests than our own share, we are stealing. This sounds strange doctrine; we prefer rather making vague acknowledgments, and shrink from pursuing them into detail. We say vaguely, that in all we do we should consecrate ourselves to G.o.d, and our own lips condemn us; for which among us cares to learn the way to do it.

The devoir of a knight was understood in the courts of chivalry, the lives of heroic men, pagan and Christian, were once held up before the world as patterns of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are wanted more than ever, Protestantism unhappily stands with a drawn sword on the threshold of the inquiry, and tells us that it is impious. The law has been fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our business is to appropriate another's righteousness, and not, like t.i.tans, to be scaling Heaven by profane efforts of our own. Protestants, we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a representation of their doctrines. But we know also, that unless men may feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try, that they can purify themselves, can live n.o.ble and worthy lives, unless this is set before them as the thing which they are to do, and can succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know beforehand will end in failure, and if they may not live for G.o.d they will live for themselves.

And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is, that every thread of it of its own free energy shall do what it ought. The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those of sins committed; more terrible perhaps, because more palpable and sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person, to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,--and Irish famines follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one remedy which will avail, that the thing which we call public opinion learn something of the meaning of human n.o.bleness, and demand some approximation to it. As things are we have no idea of what a human being ought to be. After the first rudimental conditions we pa.s.s at once into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect money, we respect rank, we respect ability-- character is as if it had no existence.

In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter. Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry remains unaffected.

And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of our material splendour an advance of the race.

One fruit only our mother earth offers up with pride to her maker--her human children made n.o.ble by their life upon her; and how wildly on such matters we now are wandering let this one instance serve to show. At the moment at which we write, a series of letters are appearing in the Times newspaper, letters evidently of a man of ability, and endorsed in large type by the authorities of Printing House Square, advocating the establishment of a free Greek state with its centre at Constantinople, on the ground that the Greek character has at last achieved the qualities essential for the formation of a great people, and that endued as it is with the practical commercial spirit, and taking everywhere rational views of life, there is no fear of a repet.i.tion from it of the follies of the age of Pericles. We should rather think there was not: and yet the writer speaks without any appearance of irony, and is saying what he obviously means.

In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge of the outward world, and progress in material wealth. This last, for the present, creates, perhaps, more evils than it relieves; but suppose this difficulty solved, suppose the wealth distributed, and every peasant living like a peer--what then? If this is all, one n.o.ble soul outweighs the whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the universe, the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.

Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars. But left to their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, they may bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire. One real service, and perhaps only one, knowledge alone and by itself will do for us--it can explode existing superst.i.tions. Everything has its appointed time, superst.i.tion like the rest; and theologies, that they may not overlive the period in which they can be of advantage to mankind, are condemned, by the conditions of their being, to weave a body for themselves out of the ideas of the age of their birth; ideas which, by the advance of knowledge, are seen to be imperfect or false. We cannot any longer be told that there must be four inspired gospels--neither more nor less--because there are four winds and four elements. The chemists now count some sixty elements, ultimately, as some of them think, reducible into one; and the gospel, like the wind, may blow from every point under heaven.

But effectual to destroy old superst.i.tions, whether it is equally successful in preventing others from growing in their place, is less certain and obvious..

In these days of table-turnings, mesmerisms, spirit- rappings, odyle fluids, and millenarian pamphlets selling 80,000 copies among our best-educated cla.s.ses, we must be allowed to doubt.

Our one efficient political science hinges on selfinterest, and the uniform action of motives among the ma.s.ses of mankind--of selfish motives reducible to system. Such philosophies and such sciences would but poorly explain the rise of Christianity, of Mahometanism, or of the Reformation. They belong to ages of comparative poverty of heart, when the desires of men are limited to material things; when men are contented to labour, and eat the fruit of their labour, and then lie down and die. While such symptoms remain among us, our faith in progress may remain unshaken; but it will be a faith which, as of old, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

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THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

If the enormous undertaking of the Bollandist editors had been completed, it would have contained the histories of 25,000 saints. So many the catholic church acknowledged and accepted as her ideals; as men, who had not only done her honour by the eminence of their sanct.i.ty, but who had received while on earth an openly divine recognition of it in gifts of supernatural power. And this vast number is but a selection; the editors chose only out of the ma.s.s before them what was most noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of national interest.

It is no more than a fraction of that singular mythology which for so many ages delighted the Christian world, which is still held in external reverence among the Romanists, and of which the modern historians, provoked by its feeble supernaturalism, and by the entire absence of critical ability among its writers to distinguish between fact and fable, have hitherto failed to speak a reasonable word. Of the attempt in our own day to revive an interest in them we shall say little in this place. They have no form or beauty to give them attraction in themselves; and for their human interest, the broad atmosphere of the world suited ill with these delicate plants which had grown up under the shadow of the convent wall; they were exotics, not from another climate, but from another age; the breath of scorn fell on them, and having no root in the hearts and beliefs of men any more, but only in the sentimentalities and make-beliefs, they withered and sank. And yet, in their place as historical phenomena they are as remarkable as any of the pagan mythologies; to the full as remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length and firmness of hold they once exercised on the conviction of mankind is to pa.s.s for anything in the estimate--and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the catholic faith.

Philosophy has rescued the old theogonies from ridicule; their extravagancies, even the most grotesque of them, can be now seen to have their root in an idea, often a deep one, representing features of natural history or of metaphysical speculation--and we do not laugh at them any more. In their origin, they were the consecration of the first-fruits of knowledge; the expression of a real reverential belief. Then time did its work on them; knowledge grew and they could not grow; they became monstrous and mischievous, and were driven out by Christianity with scorn and indignation.

But it is with human inst.i.tutions, as it is with men themselves; we are tender with the dead when their power to hurt us has pa.s.sed away; and as Paganism can never more be dangerous, we have been able to command a calmer att.i.tude towards it, and to detect under its most repulsive features sufficient latent elements of genuine thought to satisfy us that even in their darkest aberrations men are never wholly given over to falsehood and absurdity. When philosophy has done for mediaeval mythology what it has done for Hesiod and for the Edda, we shall find in it at least as deep a sense of the awfulness and mystery of life, and we shall find also a moral element there which at their best they never had. The lives of the saints are always simple, often childish, seldom beautiful; yet, as Goethe observed, if without beauty they are always good.

And as a phenomenon, let us not deceive ourselves on its magnitude. The Bollandists were restricted on many sides. They took only what was in Latin--while every country in Europe had its own home-growth in its own language--and thus many of the most characteristic of the lives are not to be found at all in their collection.

And again, they took but one life of each saint, composed in all cases late, and compiled out of the ma.s.s of various shorter lives which had grown up in different localities out of popular tradition; so that many of their longer productions have an elaborate literary character, with an appearance of artifice which, till we know how they came into existence, might blind us to the vast width and variety of the traditionary sources from which they are drawn. In the twelfth century there were sixty-six lives extant of St. Patrick alone; and that in a country where every parish had its own special saint and special legend of him. These sixty-six lives may have contained (Mr. Gibbon says must have contained) at least as many thousand lies. Perhaps so. To severe criticism, even the existence of a single apostle, St.

Patrick, appears problematical. But at least there is the historical fact, about which admits of no mistake, that they did grow up in some way or other, that they were repeated, sung, listened to, written, and read; that these lives in Ireland, and all over Europe and over the earth, wherever the catholic faith was preached, stories like these sprang out of the heart of the people, and grew and shadowed over the entire believing mind of the catholic world. Wherever church was founded, or soil was consecrated for the long resting-place of those who had died in the faith; wherever the sweet bells of convent or of monastery were heard in the evening air, charming the unquiet world to rest and remembrance of G.o.d, there rested the memory of some apostle who had laid the first stone, there was the sepulchre of some martyr whose relics reposed beneath the altar, of some confessor who had suffered there for his Master's sake, of some holy ascetic who in silent self-chosen austerity had woven a ladder there of prayer and penance, on which the angels were believed to have ascended and descended. It is not a phenomenon of an age or of a century; it is characteristic of the history of Christianity. From the time when the first preachers of the faith pa.s.sed out from their homes by that quiet Galilean lake, to go to and fro over the earth, and did their mighty work, and at last disappeared and were not any more seen, these sacred legends began to grow. Those who had once known them, who had drawn from their lips the blessed message of light and life, one and all would gather together what fragments they could find of their stories. Rumours blew in from all the winds. They had been seen here, had been seen there, in the farthest corners of the earth, preaching, contending, suffering, prevailing. Affection did not stay to scrutinize. As when some member of a family among ourselves is absent in some far place from which sure news of him comes slowly and uncertainly; if he has been in the army, on some dangerous expedition, or at sea, or anywhere where real or imaginary dangers stimulate anxiety; or when one is gone away from us altogether--fallen perhaps in battle--and when the story of his end can be collected but fitfully from strangers who only knew his name, but had heard him n.o.bly spoken of; the faintest threads are caught at; reports, the vagueness of which might be evident to indifference, are to love strong grounds of confidence, and "trifles light as air" establish themselves as certainties;--so, in those first Christian communities, travellers came through from east and west; legions on the march, or caravans of wandering merchants; and one had been in Rome and seen Peter disputing with Simon Magus; another in India, where he had heard St. Thomas preaching to the Brahmins; a third brought with him from the wilds of Britain, a staff which he had cut, as he said, from a thorn tree, the seed of which St. Joseph had sown there, and which had grown to its full size in a single night, making merchandize of the precious relic out of the credulity of the believers. So the legends grew, and were treasured up, and loved, and trusted; and alas! all which we have been able to do with them is to call them lies, and to point a shallow moral on the impostures and credulities of the early catholic. An atheist could not wish us to say more; if we can really believe that the Christian church was made over, in its very cradle to lies and to the father of lies, and was allowed to remain in his keeping, so to say, till yesterday, he will not much trouble himself with any faith which after such an admission we may profess to entertain. For as this spirit began in the first age in which the church began to have a history; so it continued so long as the church as an integral body retained its vitality; and only died out in the degeneracy which preceded, and which brought on the Reformation. For fourteen hundred years these stories held their place, and rang on from age to age, from century to century; as the new faith widened its boundaries and numbered ever more and more great names of men and women who had fought and died for it, so long their histories living in the hearts of those for whom they laboured, laid hold of them and filled them, and the devout imagination, possessed with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out into life, and form, and reality. And doubtless, if we try them by any historical canon, we have to say that quite endless untruths grew in this way to be believed among men; and not believed only, but held sacred, pa.s.sionately and devotedly; not filling the history books only, not only serving to amuse and edify the refectory, or to furnish matter for meditation in the cell, but claiming days for themselves of special remembrance, entering into liturgies and inspiring prayers, forming the spiritual nucleus of the hopes and fears of millions of human souls.

From the hard barren standing ground of the fact idolater, what a strange sight must be that still mountain peak on the wild west Irish sh.o.r.e, where for more than ten centuries, a rude old bell and a carved chip of oak have witnessed, or seemed to witness, to the presence long ago there of the Irish apostle; and in the sharp crystals of the trap rock a path has been worn smooth by the bare feet and bleeding knees of the pilgrims, who still, in the August weather, drag their painful way along it as they have done for a thousand years. Doubtless the "Lives of the Saints" are full of lies. Are then none in the Iliad? in the legends of AEneas? Were the stories sung in the liturgy of Eleusis all so true? so true as fact? Are the songs of the Cid or of Siegfried? We say nothing of the lies in these, but why? Oh, it will be said, but they are fictions, they were never supposed to be true. But they were supposed to be true, to the full as true as the Legenda Aurea. Oh then, they are poetry; and besides, they have nothing to do with Christianity. Yes, that is it; they have nothing to do with Christianity. It has grown such a solemn business with us, and we bring such long faces to it, that we cannot admit or conceive to be at all naturally admissible such a light companion as the imagination. The distinction between secular and religious has been extended even to the faculties; and we cannot tolerate in others the fulness and freedom which we have lost or rejected for ourselves. Yet it has been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found themselves off the recognized ground of Romance and Paganism, and they failed to see the same principles at work, though at work with new materials. In the records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often insisted on that two kinds of truth run for ever side by side, or rather, crossing in and out with each other, form the warp and the woof of the coloured web which we call history. The one, the literal and external truths corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered laws of fact: the other, the truth of feeling and of thought, which embody themselves either in distorted pictures of the external, or in some entirely new creation; sometimes moulding and shaping real history, sometimes taking the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or popular legend; sometimes appearing as recognized fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It is useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood. We are stating a fact, not a theory, and if it makes truth and falsehood difficult to distinguish, that is nature's fault, not ours. Fiction is only false, when it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction? but when it is--to law. To try it by its correspondence to the real is wretched pedantry; we create as nature creates, by the force which is in us, which refuses to be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are only false when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our inventions are fact, when we subst.i.tute truths of one kind for truths of another; when we subst.i.tute,--and again we must say when we intentionally subst.i.tute;--whenever persons, and whenever facts seize strongly hold of the imagination, (and of course when there is anything remarkable in them they must and will do so,) invention glides into the images as they form in us; it must, as it ever has, from the first legends of a cosmogony, to the written life of the great man who died last year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot relate facts as they are, they must first pa.s.s through ourselves, and we are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing in the transit. The great outlines alone lie around us as imperative and constraining; the detail we each fill up variously according to the turn of our sympathies, the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of things, and therefore it may be said that the only literally true history possible, is the history which mind has left of itself in all the changes through which it has pa.s.sed.

Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superst.i.tious as Surius, and Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus and Pliny; Suetonius gives us prodigies, when Surius has miracles, but that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes a life of Lycurgus with details of his childhood, and of the trials and vicissitudes of his age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of England.

No rect.i.tude of intention will save us from mistakes.

Sympathies and antipathies are but synonyms of prejudice, and indifference is impossible. Love is blind, and so is every other pa.s.sion; love believes eagerly what it desires; it excuses or pa.s.ses lightly over blemishes, it dwells on what is beautiful, while dislike sees a tarnish on what is brightest, and deepens faults into vices. Do we believe that all this is a disease of unenlightened times, and that in our strong sunlight only truth can get received: then let us contrast the portrait for instance of Sir Robert Peel as it is drawn in the Free Trade Hall, at Manchester, at the county meeting, and in the Oxford Common Room. It is not so. Faithful and literal history is possible only to an impa.s.sive spirit; it is impossible to man, until perfect knowledge and perfect faith in G.o.d shall enable him to see and endure every fact in its reality; until perfect love shall kindle in him under its touch the one just emotion which is in harmony with the eternal order of all things.

How far we are in these days from approximating to such a combination we need not here insist. Criticism in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems to have accomplished great intellectual triumphs: and in Germany and France and among ourselves we have our new schools of the philosophy of history; yet their real successes have hitherto only been destructive; when philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work without a theory, and what is a theory but an imperfect generalization caught up by a predisposition? what is Comte's great division of the eras, but a theory, and facts but as day in his hands which he can mould to ill.u.s.trate it, as every clever man will find facts to be, let his theory be what it will. Intellect can destroy but it cannot make alive again,--call in the creative faculties, call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have living figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which ever lived before. Alas, the high faith in which Love and Intellect can alone unite in their fulness, has not yet found utterance in modern historians.

The greatest man who has as yet given himself to the recording of human affairs is, beyond question, Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a serene calmness of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling; he took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may have been Republican, but he has left no sign whether he was either: he appears to have sifted facts with scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn, his hatred, according only to individual merit, and these are rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of his portraits than expressed in words by himself. Yet such a power of seeing into things was only possible to him, because there was no party left with which he could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in Rome through which he could feel; the spirit of Rome, the spirit of life had gone away to seek other forms, and the world of Tacitus was a heap of decaying inst.i.tutions; a stage where men and women, as they themselves were individually base or n.o.ble, played over their little parts. Life indeed was come into the world, was working in it, and silently shaping the old dead corpse into fresh and beautiful being; Tacitus alludes to it once only in one brief scornful chapter; and the most poorly gifted of those forlorn biographers whose unreasoning credulity was piling up the legends of St. Mary and the Apostles which now drive the ecclesiastical historian to despair, knew more, in his divine hope and faith, of the real spirit which had gone out among mankind, than the keenest and gravest intellect which ever set itself to contemplate them.

And now having in some degree cleared the ground of difficulties, let us go back to the Lives of the Saints.

If Bede tells us lies about St. Cuthbert, we will disbelieve his stories, but we will not call Bede a liar, even though he prefaces his life with a declaration that he has set down nothing but what he has ascertained on the clearest evidence. We are driven to no such alternative; our canons of criticism are different from Bede's, and so are our notions of probability. Bede would expect a priori, and would therefore consider as sufficiently attested by a consent of popular tradition, what the oaths of living witnesses would fail to make credible to a modern English jury. We will call Bede a liar only if he put forward his picture of St. Cuthbert, as a picture of a life which he considered admirable and excellent, as one after which he was endeavouring to model his own, and which he held up as a pattern of imitation, when in his heart he did not consider it admirable at all, when he was making no effort at the austerities which he was lauding. The histories of the Saints are written as ideals of a Christian life; they have no elaborate and beautiful forms; single and straightforward as they are,--if they are not this they are nothing. For fourteen centuries the religious mind of the catholic world threw them out as its form of hero wors.h.i.+p, as the heroic patterns of a form of human life which each Christian within his own limits was endeavouring to realize. The first martyrs and confessors were to those poor monks what the first Dorian conquerors were in the war songs of Tyrtaeus, what Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon and Diomed were wherever Homer was sung or read; or in more modern times what Turpin was in the court of Charlemagne or the Knights of the Round Table in the halls of the Norman castles. This is what they were; and the result is that immense and elaborate hagiology. As with the battle heroes too, the inspiration lies in the universal idea; the varieties of character (with here and there an exception) are slight and unimportant; as examples they were for universal human imitation.

Lancelot or Tristram were equally true to the spirit of chivalry; and Patrick on the mountain or Antony in the desert are equal models of patient austerity. The knights fight with giants, enchanters, robbers, unknightly n.o.bles, or furious wild beasts; the Christians fight with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The knight leaves the comforts of home in quest of adventures, the saint in quest of penance, and on the bare rocks or in desolate wildernesses subdues the devil in his flesh with prayers and sufferings, and so alien is it all to the whole thought and system of the modern Christian, that he either rejects such stories altogether as monks' impostures, or receives them with disdainful wonder, as one more shameful form of superst.i.tion with which human nature has insulted heaven and disgraced itself.

Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many centuries lead the sort of life which they are said to have led. We have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern university, where the old monks' language and affectation of unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a ma.s.s of bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate; and very likely this was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the fifteenth century. It had begun to be, and it was a symptom of a very rapid disorder in them, promptly terminating in dissolution; but long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which wisely or foolishly these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality, in being a very slightly idealized portrait of it. We are not speaking of the miracles; that is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of nature, whatever came to pa.s.s without an obvious cause was at once set down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of course the especial servants of G.o.d would not be left without graces to outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest natural is the highest supernatural, it is not everybody that is able to see that; natural facts permit us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they had used to make themselves what they were: and as we said, in this part of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth-- scarcely even exaggeration. We have doc.u.mentary evidence, which has been pa.s.sed through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way some men (and those, men of vast mind and vast influence in their day, not mere ignorant fanatics,) conducted themselves, where myth has no room to enter. We know something of the hair-s.h.i.+rt of Thomas a Becket, and other uneasy penances of his; and there was another poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not easily outrun: that was he who, when the earth's mighty ones were banded together to crush him under their armed heels, spoke but one little word; and it fell among them like the spear of Cadmus; the strong ones turned their hands against each other, and the armies melted away; and the proudest monarch of the earth lay at that monk's threshold three winter nights in the scanty clothing of penance, suing miserably for forgiveness. Or again, to take a fairer figure: there is a poem extant, the genuineness of which we believe has not been challenged, composed by Columbkill, commonly called St.

Columba. He was a hermit in Aran, a rocky island in the Atlantic, outside Galway Bay; from which he was summoned, we do not know how, but in a manner which appeared to him to be a divine call, to go away and be bishop of Iona. The poem is a "Farewell to Aran," which he wrote on leaving it; and he lets us see something of a hermit's life there. "Farewell," he begins (we are obliged to quote from memory), "a long farewell to thee, Aran of my heart. Paradise is with thee, the garden of G.o.d within the sound of thy bells.

The angels love Aran. Each day an angel comes there to join in its services." And then he goes on to describe his "dear cell," and the holy happy hours which he had spent there, "with the wind whistling through the loose stones, and the sea spray hanging on his hair." Aran is no better than a wild rock. It is strewed over with the ruins which may still be seen of the old hermitages; and at their best they could have been but such places as sheep would huddle under in a storm, and s.h.i.+ver in the cold and wet which would pierce through to them.

Or, if written evidence be too untrustworthy, there are silent witnesses which cannot lie, that tell the same touching story. Whoever loiters among the ruins of a monastery will see, commonly leading out of the cloisters, rows of cellars half under-ground, low, damp, and wretched-looking; an earthen floor, bearing no trace of pavement; a roof from which the mortar and the damp keep up (and always must have kept up) a perpetual ooze: for a window a narrow slip in the wall, through which the cold and the wind find as free an access as the light. Such as they are, a well-kept dog would object to accept a night's lodging in them; and if they had been prison cells, thousands of philanthropic tongues would have trumpeted out their horrors. The stranger perhaps supposes that they were the very dungeons of which he has heard such terrible things. He asks his guide, and his guide tells him they were the monks'

dormitories. Yes; there on that wet soil, with that dripping roof above them, was the self-chosen home of those poor men. Through winter frost, through rain and storm, through summer suns.h.i.+ne, generation after generation of them, there they lived and prayed, and at last lay down and died.

It is all gone now--gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such. No one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth floors and wet dungeons, or wild islands to live in, when he could get anything better. Either we are wiser, or more humane, or more self-indulgent; at any rate we are something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an impa.s.sable gulf which this age or this epoch will not see bridged over. Nevertheless, these modern hagiologists, however wrongly they went to work at it, had detected, and were endeavouring to fill, a very serious blank in our educational system; a very serious blank indeed, and one which, somehow, we must contrive to get filled if the education of character is ever to be more than a name with us. To try and teach people how to live without giving them examples in which our rules are ill.u.s.trated, is like teaching them to draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without designs to study them in; or to write verse by the laws of rhyme and metre without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are seen in their effects. It is a principle which we have forgotten, and it is one which the old Catholics did not forget. We do not mean that they set out with saying to themselves "we must have examples, we must have ideals;" very likely they never thought about it at all; love for their holy men, and a thirst to know about them, produced the histories; and love unconsciously working gave them the best for which they could have wished. The boy at school at the monastery, the young monk disciplining himself as yet with difficulty under the austerities to which he had devoted himself, the old halting on toward the close of his pilgrimage, all of them had before their eyes, in the legend of the patron saint, a personal realization of all they were trying after; leading them on, beckoning to them, and pointing, as they stumbled among their difficulties, to the marks which his own footsteps had left, as he had trod that hard path before them. It was as if the church was for ever saying to them:--"You have doubts and fears, and trials and temptations outward and inward; you have sinned, perhaps, and feel the burden of your sin. Here was one who, like you, in this very spat, under the same sky, treading the same soil, among the same hills and woods and rocks and riven, was tried like you, tempted like you, sinned like you; but here he prayed, and persevered, and did penance, and washed out his sins; he fought the fight, he vanquished the evil one, he triumphed, and now he reigns a saint with Christ in heaven. The same ground which yields you your food, once supplied him; he breathed and lived, and felt, and died here; and now, from his throne in the sky, he is still looking down lovingly on his children, making intercession for you that you may have grace to follow him, that by-and-by he may himself offer you at G.o.d's throne as his own."

It is impossible to measure the influence which a personal reality of this kind must have exercised on the mind, thus daily and hourly impressed upon it through a life; there is nothing vague any more, no abstract excellences to strain after; all is distinct, personal, palpable. It is no dream. The saint's bones are under the altar; nay, perhaps, his very form and features undissolved. Under some late abbot the coffin may have been opened and the body seen without mark or taint of decay. Such things have been, and the emaciation of a saint will account for it without a miracle. Daily some incident of his story is read aloud, or spoken of, or preached upon. In quaint beautiful forms it lives in light in the long chapel windows; and in the summer matins his figure, lighted up in splendour, gleams down on them as they pray, or streams in mysterious shadowy tints along the pavement, clad, as it seems, in soft celestial glory, and s.h.i.+ning as he s.h.i.+nes in heaven.

Alas, alas, where is it all gone?

We are going to venture a few thoughts on the wide question, what possibly may have been the meaning of so large a portion of the human race and so many centuries of Christianity having been surrendered and seemingly sacrificed to the working out this dreary asceticism. If right once, then it is right now; if now worthless, then it could never have been more than worthless; and the energies which spent themselves on it were like corn sown upon the rock, or substance given for that which is not bread. We supposed ourselves challenged recently for our facts. Here is an enormous fact which there is no evading. It is not to be slurred over with indolent generalities, with unmeaning talk of superst.i.tion, of the twilight of the understanding, of barbarism, and of nursery credulity; it is matter for the philosophy of history, if the philosophy has yet been born which can deal with it; one of the solid, experienced facts in the story of mankind which must be accepted and considered with that respectful deference which all facts claim of their several sciences, and which will certainly not disclose its meaning (supposing it to have a meaning) except to reverence, to sympathy, to love. We must remember that the men who wrote these stories, and who practised these austerities, were the same men who composed our liturgies, who built our churches and our cathedrals--and the gothic cathedral is, perhaps, on the whole, the most magnificent creation which the mind of man has as yet thrown out of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy of history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being certain progressive organizing laws in which the fretful lives of each of us are gathered into and subordinated in some larger unity. Thus age is linked on to age, as we are moving forward, with an horizon for ever expanding and advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of any human phenomenon is a criterion of its importance, and definite forms of thought working through long historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast laws.

--imply a distinct step in human progress; something previously unrealized is being lived out, and rooted into the heart of mankind. Nature never half does her work. She goes over it, and over it, to make a.s.surance sure, and makes good her ground with wearying repet.i.tion. A single section of a short paper is but a small s.p.a.ce to enter on so vast an enterprise, nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may possibly have meant.

First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world whatever form the spirit of the world a.s.sumes, the ideals of Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one extreme the other will verge into the contrary. In those rough times the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded, and monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the destruction and abnegation of the animal. The war hero in the battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis of the fleshly man, the saint in the desert of the spiritual. But this is slight, imperfect, and if true at all only partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not contradictories; they are the complements in the perfect character; and in the middle ages, as in all ages of genuine earnestness, interfused and penetrated each other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors; and those grand old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral aisles were something higher than only one more form of the beast of prey. Monasticism represented something more positive than a protest against the world. We believe it to have been the realization of the infinite loveliness and beauty of personal purity.

In the earlier civilization, the Greeks, however genuine their reverence for the G.o.ds, do not seem to have supposed any part of their duty to the G.o.ds to consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as was their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with all their loftiness and their n.o.bleness, with their ready love of moral excellence in some of its manifestations, as fort.i.tude, or devotion to liberty and to home, they had little or no idea of what we mean by morality. With a few rare exceptions, pollution, too detestable to be even named among ourselves, was of familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman; and was not supposed to be incompatible, and was not, in fact, incompatible with any of those especial excellences which we so admire in the Greeks.

Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the republic), there was a sufficiently austere morality.

A public officer of state, whose business was to inquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only once on this planet. There was never a people before, and there has been none since, with sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality is not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself.

It is obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it, for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for itself. The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the old spirit endured. But as soon as the energy grew slack, when the religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in, and there was no more danger to face, and the world was at their feet, all was swept away as before a whirlwind; there was no loveliness in virtue to make it desired, and the Rome of the Censors presents, in its later age, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the coa.r.s.est animal desire, with means unlimited to gratify it. In Latin literature, as little as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity. Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the wise man whose pa.s.sions and whose appet.i.tes are trained into obedience to reason. But this is no more than the philosophy of the old Roman life, which got itself expressed in words when men were tired of the reality; it involves no sense of sin. If sin could be indulged without weakening our self-command, or without hurting other people, Roman philosophy would have nothing to say against it.

The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy; without speculating on the why, they felt that indulgence of animal pa.s.sion did, in fact, pollute them, and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.

Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe, giving the spirit to G.o.d, but declaring matter to be eternally and incurably evil; and looking forward to the time when the spirit should be emanc.i.p.ated from the body, as the beginning of, or as the return to, its proper existence, took no especial care what became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of flesh. If it sinned, sin was its element; it could not do other than sin; purity of conduct could not make the body clean, and no amount of bodily indulgence could shed a taint upon the spirit--a very comfortable doctrine, and one which, under various disguises, has appeared a good many times on the earth. But Christianity, shaking it all off, would present the body to G.o.d as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the material world conquered from the appet.i.tes and l.u.s.ts, and from the devil whose abode they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the penances and night-watchings; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh, and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much as one corrupt thought.

And they may have been absurd and extravagant; when the feeling is stronger than the judgment, men are very apt to be so. If, in the recoil from Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus purified had contracted supernatural virtue and could work miracles, they had not sufficiently attended to the facts, and so far are not unexceptionable witnesses to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and in virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage, we are lifted forward a mighty step which we can never again retrace.

Personal purity is not the whole for which we have to care, it is but one feature in the ideal character of man.

The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is with science; generations of men have given themselves exclusively to single branches, which, when mastered, form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in life, so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years to make good a single step. Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to speak in large language, and remember the numbers of individual souls who have been at work at it; but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration of the race? Are we crawling out of the cradle, or are we tottering into the gave?

In nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood?

Who knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our steps when we have taken them, and thankfully to accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any character which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we require not greatness only, but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and susceptible as woman's modesty.

So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil, which hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness.

If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they look back on them from the easiness of modern Christianity which has ceased to demand any heavy effort of self-sacrifice, they either revile the superst.i.tion or pity the ignorance which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion--and, loud in their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey in this earth of ours, they set it by, pa.s.s it over, dismiss it out of history, with some poor common-place simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not do. Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their spiritual existence.

We intended to leave our readers with something lighter than all this in the shape of literary criticism and a few specimen extracts; both of which must now, however, be necessarily brief--we are running out our s.p.a.ce. Whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals, should rather go anywhere than to the Bollandists, and universally never read a late life when he can command an early one, for the genius in them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like riverwater, is most pure nearest to the fountain head. We are lucky in possessing several specimens of the mode of their growth in late and early lives of the same saints, and the process in all is similar. Out of the lives of St. Bride three are left; out of the sixty-six of St. Patrick, there are eight; the first of each belonging to the sixth century, the latest to the thirteenth. The first are in verse; they belong to a time when there was no one to write such things, and were popular in form and popular in their origin--the flow is easy, the style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and the exuberance of legendary creativeness we exchange for the hard dogmatic record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. The marvellous in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the after miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of poets' metaphors for literal truth. There is often real, genial, human beauty in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps,